Coyotes Among Us
Layla the Learned
Our current canine project is going well into a third year. Layla has learned phrases like “crunchies for breakfast?” This when I’m barely awake after finishing our morning constitutional (hers, since I’m just following behind with the doodie bag). She doesn’t reply but moves directly to the staircase and waits for me to head downstairs. She either follows and heads for her food bowl, or she doesn’t. Days when she doesn’t, I head for the shower. Layla is a very fussy eater and when she doesn’t want to eat, she abstains. Her longest fasting was for two days.
“You need to take a pee?” brings a long look, and she either heads for the stairs or goes back to sleep. It requires, for the animal behaviorists in the crowd, a bit of translation, though I swear she’s learning the language.
“Leave it!” means get the hell away from that roadside garbage or I’ll be very grumpy and you don’t like me when I’m grumpy.
I’m telling you, the girl is smart. Though I suspect her wild cousin, Senor Coyote is smarter.
Coyotes Among Us
It took into late in the 20th century for science to acknowledge other species actually go about their day asking more than ‘what’s instinct’s telling me?’ Anthropomorphism–attributing human behavior to animals–was the ultimate scientific sin and still is for some. When all such doubters need is to grab a leash and walk a dog daily for a week or two and observe. I wouldn’t claim Layla is a PhD candidate, but I also wouldn’t claim things she does effortlessly are without keen intelligence behind them.
Surrounded by sentient animals and yet in grade school my teachers the nuns made it clear that we humans, ‘were created in the image of god’ and therefore are alone the only critical thinkers. Well, isn’t that special as the Church Lady used to say?
Why the heck would a wolf decide her best interest lay inside the light of a campfire? OK maybe one or two might have risked it, but what would it take to create a new species? Those Indians couldn’t have been the greatest company, having not bathed since summer, being cold and wishing they could make it to Bermuda for the winter, so why hang out with them? A favorite animal behaviorist, Temple Grandin suggests our ancestors learned tribal cooperation from their four-footed canid companions.
Here’s a bitter irony: not so far back in the day, college-trained ethologists–and a few who still linger–declared that all other high-order species run on instinct like automatons. Being ethnically blind about others of our same species, how could we be expected to understand other species?
I’m reading Coyote America by Dan Flores at the moment. He makes an interesting claim, mainly that canids originated in North America and spread to South America–and the rest of the world via the Bering land bridge across to Siberia, Eurasia and ultimately even Africa—the reverse route humans took. And they came that way not once but several times. The gray wolf’s ancestors migrated from North America to Eurasia and later returned as the species they are today, which is a cool trick.
Today, coyotes operate in all the contiguous states, Canada, Mexico, South America, and the isthmus in between. Not in Hawaii–yet, but give them floaties and you might see them there too. Flores admires their adaptability, their cleverness and persistent in the face of a long struggle since the Europeans arrived. Coyotes have been in the eastern part of the US for a lot longer than most people think. They’ve only recently received press on making the trip, but according to Flores, coyotes have been with us in the East since the 50s. Despite Roadrunner cartoons to the contrary, they’ve long been living beyond the dessert.
“The starting point is this: the truth is that coyotes have never been solely wilderness creatures… the archeological and historical evidence is undeniable: for the 15,000 years since we humans have been in North America, coyotes have always been capable of living among us. A coyote’s primary prey happens to be our close fellow travelers, the mice and rats that flourish around and among us in profusion. As for fearing us too much to tolerate our presence, coyotes have taken our measure far too perceptively for that.”
from Coyote America by Dan Flores.
And one reason for coyotes’ push across the continent in the 20th century , Flores argues, stemmed from the successive government-funded extermination programs in the western states, seeking to eradicate them along with their cousins, the gray wolves. The half century long programs did succeed in destroying the gray wolf population, though with the unintended consequence of eliminating the coyotes’ greater competitor. Not satisfied with killing off the wolves, the US Fish and Wildlife (then more bluntly termed the Eradication Methods Lab), happily continued killing coyotes, driving them eastward.
Which brings me back to concepts of animal intelligence, morals and ethics. I don’t believe that the human intelligence is threatened by acknowledging then seeking to understand the intelligence of our fellow creatures riding the same rock. If, as anthropologists are now postulating, human ethics evolved along with the species, that it aided us in survival, then why should we dismiss out of hand that the same evolution might be true of other species? Flores says it like this:
“In our time, though, it no longer works to seek solace in the notion that other higher animals are so different from us that they entirely lack emotional lives. The Steven Pinkers of the modern world have made us understand that the human senses of fairness, equity and empathy, the fundamentals of the moral code, do not in fact spring from organized religion or advanced culture but have roots in our own evolution as a social species.”
from Coyote America by Dan Flores.
Said another way, ethics greatly aided our specie’s success. Foremost as social creatures, it is important to pledge one’s self to the common good–that which helped our ancestors survive. Thus, we are creatures of specific societies, some more tightly strictured than others. What was acceptable to the 19th century Japanese would have been anathema to a person of the western frontier: conformity vs. independence. It was, in fact, a momentous clash when these cultures encountered each other, much like others that continue today. These conflicts in culture strike so deeply because they challenge the core ethics of whichever society we belong to. In our modern age of a single world, we struggle to recognize these distinctions–and to understand their importance in how we live with each other.
And there’s the rub: if, during human evolution, we were learning that ethical behavior bettered our societal bonds, why wouldn’t other species be about the same work? And for the same reasons: it’s a working schema.
“Knowing what we currently understand about the evolutionary origins of human morality and the emotional lives of higher animals, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the fate that befell those millions of wild American canines from the 1880s to the 1930s must have caused them some staggering level of emotional trauma, and perhaps even a profoundly experienced, rudimentary sense of unfairness, the kind of mental sense that in us becomes a powerfully felt idea: injustice.”
from Coyote America by Dan Flores.
It’s not clear to me how much was known in 19th and early 20th century America about ecology and the balance of predator and prey. American Indians understood it–they practiced it because they saw the higher value. European immigrants took a long time only to relearn what the Indians already knew. And unlike the Indians who appreciated other animal intelligence, with stories about Senor Coyote as the wisest of animals, the Europeans saw them strictly as competitors, as vermin. The Indians taught the Europeans how to grow corn, and the Europeans showed them how to destroy the Earth they lived in–and its species–industrial style. Not a fair exchange, and most definitely a clash of moral standards.
There’s a telling story of how the elk herds in Yellowstone–once free from their traditional predators, wolves–had destroyed the river willows by overgrazing, in turn causing a loss of habitat for beavers, a decline in bird life, fish and severe river erosion. Having insufficient constraints on the herds, the elk would mosey down to the easiest places for dinner munching beside the river. The reintroduction of gray wolves into Yellowstone changed that: Wolves in Yellowstone. The elk were forced to stay on the move, not overgrazing the ‘easy’ places. Coyotes alone hadn’t been able to keep the elk population in balance, something a relatively few wolf packs were supremely able to accomplish.
When a species overgrazes its country’s carrying capacity, bad things follow.
Hugh Johnson, FAIA was an architect practicing in Northern Virginia when I first came up from Florida. I met him by happenstance. In the late 70s, I was working in the District near the AIA National Headquarters. Thinking to join one of the AIA national committees, I flipped a coin between the Urban Design Committee and one called Regional Development and Natural Resources. A mouthful of a name, but the committee was busy developing AIA policies ranging from saving intact ecologies to renewable energy. Hugh was one of the committee leaders back in the early 80s. Richard Stern, FAIA from New York City was another. But Hugh stood out, with his deliberate discussions and long, well researched papers that were a backbone to the committee’s work on linking architects and urban designers to the preservation of the natural world. Hugh’s heroes included Aldo Leopold, and he often quoted his book, A Sand County Almanac. I was relatively late to the game, and Hugh was my mentor in all things environmental.
Dan Flores also writes about Aldo Leopold in the early days of what grew into the environmental movement. It was a clash of culture between a traditional European view of nature as a ‘resource’ to be harvested verses a less egocentric one of living in harmony with the earth. Through the 1980s, I witnessed the slow dissolution of the Regional Development and Natural Resources Committee by a cautious AIA leadership (being kind). Even the Committee’s name suggested the reluctance the then AIA leaders had in embracing the environmental movement.
I remember hearing one national board member from Idaho declare architects had no reason being involved in environmental issues. Did he seem to think our only business was ensuring there was less of a natural world year over year? It was a rearguard action by traditionalists who, to be fair, were desirous of avoiding offending our business patrons. In the modern day, architects and the AIA stands for Green in a way I couldn’t imagine back then.
Perhaps simplistically, I saw a connection between those architects and urbanists who incorporated the natural environment in their thinking vs. others who at best considered nature as no more than a foil for aggrandizing their structures. Frank Lloyd Wright vs. Phillip Johnson, perhaps?
We are conflicted when we think about other predators–we are sorely troubled by losing little Fluffy the cat to a coyote. We’d prefer our wild predators be more sensitive to our feelings–and pets. I’ll confess that I objected to the fat beaver eating my young trees for desert, so I lengthened the seawall to send him down the water a piece to the neighbor’s yard. However, to fully embrace my own contradictions, one day when we’re down at the Outer Banks I plan to sign up for a wolf howl conducted by the US Park Service in the Great Dismal Swamp. And I’ll bring Layla since she loves her a good howl.
Photo by Lian Tomtit on Unsplash
Outside
It’s going on without us
in the warming, flowers working
on their May Day–looking on.
Geese are sitting eggs
eagles raising nestlings
seagulls gone back to the river
a fox is circuiting her kits in den
shortly they’ll be spilling out
to find the world they’re born to.
Azealia banks and dogwoods
already redbud’s purple fingers
and this year is coming early
with no one on the trail.
Earth could get along without us
doing fine before we came,
we social creatures on restriction
uncertain in our silence
watch the outside–looking on.